A friend asked me to investigate the following mystery: why do 5-10% of skulls from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC, all over the world, have holes in them? Why do bone growth patterns indicate that most ...

You’ve probably heard AI is a “black box”. No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, “reward” it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI ...

Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario. Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast, timelines forecast, takeoff forecast, ...

Paul Fussell wants to talk about class. (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later) He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's ...

The year is 2028, and this is Turing Test!, the game show that separates man from machine! Our star tonight is Dr. Andrea Mann, a generative linguist at University of California, Berkeley. She’ll face ...

Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate ...

Twice a year, I try to advertise ACX meetups around the world. We’ll do the Fall version of those shortly, but now it’s time to announce the list of every college effective altruism meetup we’re ...

There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the ...

In the gods’ great scramble for human followers, Nodens would seem to have lost decisively. We know him only from vague inscriptions at two archaeological sites near the Welsh-English border. One ...

Moltbook is “a social network for AI agents”, although “humans [are] welcome to observe”. The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent ...

Last Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, the first time this designation has ever been applied to a US company. The trigger for the move was ...

[continued from Part 1 here. I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or ...